1st Edition

Education and the Politics of Memory in Russia and Eastern Europe Infested with History

Edited By Sergey Rumyantsev Copyright 2025
352 Pages
by Routledge

352 Pages
by Routledge

This book examines both formal and extracurricular education, and the politics of memory and historical narratives in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Russia, and Ukraine.   The misalignment between memory politics and history politics forms a central theme of this book. Structured in three parts, it focuses on school education in the post-Soviet states over the 30 years between the collapse of the Soviet... Read more

Foreword, Eckhardt Fuchs; 1. “Infested with History”: An Introduction, Sergey Rumyantsev Part I: Concepts of Patriotic Education 2. Routes of the Post-Soviet Historical Imagination: Between “Civilization” and the “Nation-State”, Victor Shnirelman; 3. So Ashamed not to Know “Our” History: Conflicts, Memory Politics, Humanities, and the School in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Russia and Ukraine, Sergey Rumyantsev; 4. Historification in Literature Education in Armenia, Maria Karapetyan Part II: Myths and Mythologization in Textbooks and Curricula 5. “The World of Islam” and the Secular Political Regime: How Religion is Taught in Azerbaijani Schools, Huseynova Sevil; 6. The “Azerbaijani Genocide”: Memory Politics and National History in Schools, Jafar Akhundov; 7. Planted Flags? The Political Life of Trees and Arboreal Patriotism in Armenia, Tsypylma Darieva; 8. National, European, or Multicultural? Ukrainian History Textbooks Reimagine the Country’s Past, Serhy Yekelchyk; 9. Guarding Against the Future: Socio-political Contexts of the “List of One Hundred Books” for Russian School Students in the 2010s, Illya Kukulin Part III: History Policy and Politics of Memory 10. History as a Political Language, Ivan Kurilla; 11. Memory Practices in Donetsk: From the Establishment of Soviet Power to a Full-scale Russian Invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Oksana Mikheieva; 12. The Memory of the Great Patriotic War in the “Donetsk People’s Republic”: Commemoration, School, and Mass Media, Dmytro Tytarenko; 13. Fluid Narratives, Evolving Discourses: Armenian-Turkish Dialogue in a Changing Political Context, Philip Gamaghelyan; 14. Patriotic Education Outside and After School: Concluding Thoughts, Sergey Rumyantsev; Index

Biography

Sergey Rumyansev is a sociologist. In 2003-2014, he was a Research Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy, Sociology and Law of the Azerbaijan National Academy of Sciences (Baku). Since 2015, he is a co-founder of Centre for Independent Social Research (CISR Berlin) and leads projects on peaceful conflict transformation. His main areas of research include diaspora and migration, nationalism, politics of memory, history politics, Soviet studies, conflicts in the post-Soviet space. He is the author of Migration and Diaspora-Building in Post-Soviet Azerbaijan: Main Tendencies and Dominant Discourses (2014); and the editor of Non-Objective Conflicts: Political Practices of Sharing the Common Past. Russia, Ukraine, Moldova and Transnistria (2017).